10 Years Later...

10 years ago, in 2009, I started this blog. My intention at the time was to shower the world around me with the only brand of humour I knew at the time, sarcasm.

Then I got distracted. What distracted me you say? Well, that is the wrong question. The right question is who distracted me. And the answer is the lady who became the love of my life, my wife, the mother of my child and, naturally, subsequently, the bane of my existence... and of course, the secret to our survival is reciprocity, I am also the bane of her existence [I'd list the ways, but I'll leave that for a future post or ten]

Don't get me wrong, I still love her to death, or to bits, or to pieces ... or whichever other painful metaphor that exists for this ever consuming feeling of debilitating passion.

And so, I hereby relaunch this blog, in her honour. To commemorate our 10 year anniversary of being together, of surviving each other and of our ongoing adventure...

Marta, my love, this one's for you.

Thus, this blog shall henceforth no longer be known as Movies, Pizza, Middle East and Entrepreneurship - because let's face it, a 40 year old married man with a 5 year old has no time for movies anymore, doesn't eat enough pizza, doesn't live in the Middle East anymore and, well, Entrepreneurship... that's a blog on it's own...

Therefore, 10 years, 4 social media networks, 3 companies, 30 smart phones and 1 child later, the new name of this blog is...[trriing triiing...oh yeah, we don't do drum rolls anymore, but the sound of an egg timer is much more appropriate]..

"Rants, Pants, and Washing Machines"

- you'll get the washing machine reference in one of my first posts... 

Mark Makhoul's Benihana Experience

Benihana Kuwait is suing a blogger for posting a review! For shame! Wait for my Benihana Experience shortly! Here's Mark's Account:
My Benihana Experience

A few days back I posted about Benihana opening up at the Avenues and yesterday night I decided to pass by with Nat and try it out. The service wasn’t too bad for a restaurant that’s just been open for a few days and the staff were really friendly. The restaurant itself is made up of islands and bars with a grill in the middle of each one. You sit around the grill and the chef will come to your table and prepare the food right in front of you which makes things entertaining. It’s actually why I prefer sitting at the bar in Japanese restaurants in general, since you can talk to the chef and watch them put your dish together. The problem with my experience last night though was with the food, it was disappointing to say the least.

[YouTube]

We ordered beef negimayaki for starters followed by an Orange Blossom maki and a Hibachi Chicken. The negimaki arrived looking good and was probably the best thing we had there even though I prefer Maki’s negimaki which has a richer teriyaki sauce. The Orange Blossom was very ordinary, wouldn’t order it again. Now the Hibachi chicken which is basically grilled chicken, that was the worst. The chicken was very chewy (I could swear it was undercooked if not raw) and tasted terrible. Even after I had the chef add some more teriyaki sauce in hopes of improving the taste it didn’t work. I tried to dip it into the sauces that came with the chicken but it was hard to figure out if they were actually making things worse or not. Nat only ate one piece of chicken and left the rest while I needed my protein since I’m on a strict diet and forced myself to eat my whole plate (I can do that) but the after taste was really bad. Even the rice and the veggies that came with it tasted bad AND were under cooked. Once we left I considered picking up a frozen yogurt from Pinkberry even though I hate frozen yogurts but I just needed something to get rid of the aftertaste. A few moments later we ended up at Chocolate Bar ordering the gooey chocolate cake (bye bye diet).

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[YouTube]

I shot the two videos above of the chef preparing our meal. Benihana are known for the live shows they perform when preparing your dish so I was expecting to see [This] but ended up with the above . Would I go back to Benihana? No I wouldn’t. Their sashimi and maki’s are pretty cheap (KD1.5 for 5 pieces of Salmon sashimi for example) but there are two other Japanese restaurants at the Avenues, Wasabi and Maki, and I would prefer either one of those to Benihana.

________________________

End of Mark's Post.

I don't know about you, dear reader, but I'm not planning on going to Benihana Kuwait or any other Benihana around the world for that matter.

Sherif, Marta and The Ring! :)

Terrorists Beware!!!

There's no doubt about it. The United States of American has a sense of humor. This is evident in their approach to the war on terrorism and the people that they are sending to Afghanistan. My American friends, I'm not sure you know quite where your tax dollars are going, but your government has taken a Patch Adams approach to fighting terrorism by sending comedians to Afghanistan....

If Afghanistan was my backyard, and terrorism was the neighborhood fox that was terrorising my kids, chasing away my pet cat and scaring my wife half to death, and I called 1-800-USA Secretary of Defense to send me some support, imagine the look on my face when the doorbell rings and standing outside my door is four well dressed chickens! How the hell are they going to chase the fox away?

UNBLOCK FLICKR

I know I've been away for a while, but this was too good to pass the opportunity. I haven't had a go at our friends from du in a while, and even though people trying to do this with Etisalat will probably have the same fate, I will take this opportunity to say, as I always say, Don't du!!!!

I'm working on a presentation for something at work which had me researching the history of mosques. I needed to know what the first mosque in Islam was and, thanks to google of course, I found this link as you can see:



Of course, the logical thing to do is click on the link to go and read a little bit more about the Mosque of Qiba', the first mosque in Islam which was built in Madina after the Prophet Mohamed's immigration. I didn't get this information from that link however because, according to Umm 3allawi from Freej, du and the UAE Telecoms regulatory authorities deem the content of this link PROHIBITED!

Honestly, there's not much more I can say! UNBLOCK FLICKR!!!!

Etisalat Broadband- I'll have mine without pickles please

I was watching TV yesterday and suddenly a commercial came on with people in different situations saying how they want "it". You have no way of telling in the beginning what the ad is about until the end. So you have people saying things like "I want mine fast", others "The most important thing in mine is flexibility" and things like that. Naturally when you see commercials like this, most people's instinct is to try to guess what is the product.

The first thing that popped into my head was the Burger King campaign, Have it your way.

So I kept watching and the tagline in the end confirmed what I was thinking. It was the same campaign, Have it your way, only for a different brand. "Etisalat Broadband - How do you want yours?"

Creative geniuses behind this campaign need to go back to the drawing board and avoid drawing comparison to the Burger King Campaign, despite how stupid that campaign was to start with. I mean How else am I gonna have my burgers if I can't have them my way? Right? It's like going to buy a suit from a shop that says "Buy it in your size"....really? Because I just love wearing suits that are too short for me with my arms popping out of the end of the sleeve and the buttons on my jacket on the verge of popping. Isn't that the fashionable thing to do? Anyways, that's neither here nor there...

My response to Etisalat? I'll have my broadband with no tomatoes, no pickles, extra mayo please! Can I get curly fries too? Oh no, that's du ... I mean Hardee's!

Sports News - Portsmouth add 2 Players to Squad

For all you sports fans out there who care about up to date (or week late) sports news, I decided to post the last transfer news from the English Premier league on my blog since most of the UAE papers (the national published the story, don't know about the others, Arabic papers certainly didn't) seemed "interested" in this news. They've published news about Nigerian players signing up for Swedish clubs and games between Honduras and Trinidad and Tobago (not really, but just to illustrate irrelevance) and for "some reason" chose to ignore this...

So here goes

Portsmouth, famously known as Pompey by their fans and Premiership followers, have succeeded in strengthening their 2009/2010 squad by adding Hassan Yebda, the young French midfielder on loan from Portuguese club, Benfica as well completing the signing of Israel international Tal Ben Haim from Abu Dhabi owned Manchester City football club.





"I've come here to give 100% in each game and no less" said Ben Haim on his intentions to help the club which, after four weeks of premiership action, sits uncomfortably at the bottom of the table with four losses out of four.

Sulaiman Al Fahim, the club owner and Abu Dhabi business man, will hopefully lead a revamp at the club and return it to its rightful place in the top half of the table. These two acquisitions are just the start.

*Source - THE INTERNET - (just as reference: the BBC news page)